This thriller is both a touching love story and a masterful portrayal of the struggle for geopolitical control of postwar Germany.

The year is 1945, and with World War II finally coming to an end, Jake Geismar, former Berlin correspondent for CBS, has managed to get one of the coveted jobs to report on the Potsdam Conference. His assignment: a series of articles on the American occupation of postwar Berlin. His personal agenda: to find Lena, the German mistress he left behind at the outbreak of the war. When he stumbles onto a murder -- an American soldier has washed up on a lakeshore on the conference grounds -- he thinks he has found a unique and important Berlin story. What he finds instead is a larger story of corruption and intrigue reaching deep into the heart of the occupation and a city not only physically but morally devastated, where children scavenge for food in the rubble, sex can be had for a cigarette, and the black market is the only means of survival.

At once a murder mystery, a love story, and a riveting portrait of a unique time and place, The Good German is a historical thriller of first rank.